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Close Reading with Computers: Genre Signals, Parts of Speech, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
- Author(s):
- Martin Paul Eve (see profile)
- Date:
- 2017
- Group(s):
- LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American, TC Digital Humanities
- Subject(s):
- Twenty-first century, British literature
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- 21st century
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M69F8F
- Abstract:
- David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) contains six different generic registers. This article is the first to explore computationally the linguistic mechanisms that create these genre effects. Authorship attribution techniques incorrectly cluster the chapters of Cloud Atlas as distinct ‘authors’ using anything above the nineteen most-common words. This has implications for understandings of literary style and authorship. The seafaring parts of Mitchell’s novel, however, do not correlate with the writings of Herman Melville using Burrows’s delta method. Part-of-speech trigram visualization and analysis reveals the unique present-tense linguistic phrasings (NNP NNP VBZ and NNP VBZ DT) that lend pace to the Luisa Rey section of the novel.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NoDerivatives
76.full_.pdf